My fascination with the sky is as old as I am. The attraction for the stars has grown with me and the greater the interest in space, the greater devotion for our planet and the wonderful opportunity of life come true here.
Unfortunately, we have not honored her. It is quite possible that our species will face this century the challenge of survival, as indicated by the race we are making towards the global environmental catastrophe.
Among the many ideas and solutions, the colonization of Mars as Plan B was added to the public discussion. Believing that they tell us everything when they say, it is because we will have to escape from the Earth that they are developing this project, it is not difficult to think that this great Investment would be better applied to strategies and mechanisms to avoid this need, which would serve all humanity and all living beings on the planet.
The plan to colonize Mars, which is an escape plan, will only benefit the few who can afford it, leaving most humans to their fate. It is ironic and enlightening that, in the end, the owners of large companies that have been struggling against the transition to renewable energy because it would reduce profits or destroy business, the ones behind the movement that denies global warming and which sponsor disinformation campaigns, such as those that have blocked and delayed the shift to sustainability energy models, will be those who, no doubt, will be able to buy a future for themselves and for theirs in another planet, leaving Earth behind and most of its inhabitants in the environmental destruction they provoked, for which they contributed and who deliberately did not want to stop.
Supporting this elitist escape plan, whose motives we do not fully know, does not make sense. Our priority as a species should be to heal the Earth, which is our home, and restore what we destroy in the short time that this is still possible. To believe that the solution is to go to another, inhospitable planet, and hope that with our actions it may perhaps come to resemble with our planet, when our history has species, that destroys ecosystems and planets, not the reverse, is incomprehensible.
Let us first and foremost choose this Earth that has given us all the light and which we have forgotten so much to protect and respect, because to choose her is to choose ourselves.
And perhaps after securing this common future we can then devote ourselves to discovering how to be on other planets, no longer as fugitives of the house we have destroyed, but as a species worthy of step other soils once we understand the respect to have for the soil.
A "plan B" for the future of the species, like colonization of Mars, doesn't benefit the individuals sent there. Living on Mars as a colonist would be crap; it's more inhospitable than Antarctica and it's much harder to get people and supplies there and back. All it achieves is that the human species continues to exist. Being a Martian colonist and hearing news that Earth suffered an extinction-level event like an asteroid collision would not be fun.
And another planet is a bad "plan B" anyway; planets are a terrible space habitat, they just happen to be the only self-sustaining ones that currently exist. We shouldn't live at the bottom of a gravity well if we can help it.